Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188 View this blog in Magazine View.

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Google and Wikipedia revisited

Given that one response to my post on Fungi in Wikipedia was to say that fungi are also charismatic, so maybe I should try [insert unsexy taxon name here]. So, I've now looked at all the species I extracted from Wikipedia (nearly 72,000), ran the Google searches, and here are the results:

Site

How many times is it the top hit?

en.wikipedia.org

42515

www.birdlife.org

2125

commons.wikimedia.org

1522

plants.usda.gov

1496

species.wikimedia.org

1487

animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu

1419

amphibiaweb.org

851

www.calflora.org

770

www.fishbase.org

727

ibc.lynxeds.com

699

davesgarden.com

659

www.arkive.org

510

ukmoths.org.uk

414

zipcodezoo.com

368

www.itis.gov

304

calphotos.berkeley.edu

294

www.floridata.com

234

www.planetcatfish.com

234

www.eol.org

226

www.arthurgrosset.com

213

The table lists the top twenty sites, based on the number of times each site occupies the number one place in the Google search results. Surprise, surprise, Wikipedia wins hands down.

What is interesting is that the other top-ranking sites tend to be taxon-specific, such as FishBase, Amphibia Web, and USDA Plants. To me this suggests that the argument that Wikipedia's dominance of the search results is because it focusses on charismatic taxa doesn't hold. In fact, the truly charismatic taxa are likely to have their own, richly informative webs sites that will often beat Wikipedia in the search rankings. If your taxon is not charismatic, then it's a different story. This suggests one of two strategies for making taxon web sites that people will find. Either go for the niche market, and make a rich site for a set of taxa that you (and ideally some others) like, or add content to Wikipedia. Sites that span across all taxa will always come up against Wikipedia's dominance in the search rankings. So, it's a choice of being a specialist, or trying to compete with an über-generalist.